Finding Hope in a Post-Oil Society

By James Howard Kunstler, Orion Magazine. Posted January 23, 2007.

America invested most of its late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future: Suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It's time for us to make other arrangements.

As the American public continues sleepwalking into a future of energy scarcity, climate change, and geopolitical turmoil, we have also continued dreaming. Our collective dream is one of those super-vivid ones people have just before awakening. It is a particularly American dream on a particularly American theme: how to keep all the cars running by some other means than gasoline. We'll run them on ethanol! We'll run them on biodiesel, on synthesized coal liquids, on hydrogen, on methane gas, on electricity, on used French-fry oil...!

The dream goes around in fevered circles as each gasoline replacement is examined and found to be inadequate. But the wish to keep the cars going is so powerful that round and round the dream goes. Ethanol! Biodiesel! Coal liquids...